Step 5: Empowerment at home

Feel empowered with specific designed exercises to keep you moving forwards

Resiliency
Empowerment
Agency

These are the key traits that keep you moving in the right direction, until you have climbed out from the gravity of pain.

All the literature on chronic pain says that these three steps are key.

A women walking up the steps out of pain with agency empowerment and resilience

On a personal level, when I felt like I could not help myself and was then counting the hours between treatments because pain was building, - put it this way, it was a horrible experience.

It made me feel very vulnerable and fragile. I felt like I could not do things for myself.

As if the power was not with me.

I never want to create an environment like that.

3 images, one of a consultation, two of a women doing banded leg raises and three of a treatment to a lower back using fascial massage techniques. with the caption "When you are undertaking treatment with me you will receive a full write up and summary of our findings from your first appointment"

When you undertake treatment with me you will receive a full write up & summary of our findings from your first appointment to empower you.

This will include and detail:

Take home findings from your case history
Social and emotional factors that might be going on around your pain & what resources are available outside the treatment room.
Fascial restrictions -create tension patterns throughout your body's connective tissues.
Trigger point patterns correlating with your pain
Craniosacral findings including autonomic up-regulation in your nervous system (fight, flight, freeze & shock)
Information on how these treatments can help with your presentation
Self-care activities to help at home for stress reduction or physical stretching

I also offer at this time a suggestion of how long your care might take to get you to your agreed goal and outcome.

3 images showing the aspects of treatment progression through relief care, corrective care and maintenance care. relief care shows an older white women stretching her shoulder, corrective care shows a banded bicep curl of a younger person in their living room. Maintenance care shows someone receiving massage and soft tissue therapies to their shoulders.

I break the process down into three aspects of treatment care.

Relief care: Treatments that are reducing pain and improving motion straight away.

Corrective care: Treatments that are looking under the hood of how this situation arrived and trying to address the cause to avoid further relapses in the future.

Maintenance care: Life happens and it is important to keep investing in your health. When we have gone through the corrective care phase, a person's system as a whole is balanced, at ease and moving really well.

Life stressors are always present. It is my belief that remaining healthy is being able to roll and bend with the pressures and stressors that arrive, without them leaving their mark.

An image of someone being reassured clasping hands with the caption "Having a maintenance strategy means that you're in safe hands and there is a net there ready to help you move forwards again."

Sometimes though this is not possible. You may just have not experienced this type of stress before.

Having a maintenance strategy means that you’re in safe hands and there is a net there ready to help you move forwards again.

In this continually evolving journey of becoming ourselves, it is something I myself continuously invest in.

These offerings are designed to help to empower you.

The intention is you know exactly:

Where we are in the plan.
How the plan may adapt and change over time.
What home activity can keep occurring to progress.

Not everyone wants to do physical stretching, mobilisations and strengthening at home.

These are offerings that exist to walk alongside your journey, and sometimes will be more essential than others.

A new offering coming soon to support you is a personalised relaxation meditations and sound healing mediations recorded that you can play before sleep or at weekends to unwind.

These offers exist and are personalised to your care, your wishes and your goals.

Picture of Carmen treating a client's hip flexors face up with the caption "Not everyone wants to do physical stretching, mobilisations and strengthening at home, these are offerings that exist to walk alongside you and sometimes be more essentials than others."

We work together to build something that utilises the least amount of effort and resistance to keep moving you forwards.

Sometimes this may be as simple as finding moments of mindfulness. Such as holding a cup of tea in your hands and embodying the feeling of presence that we have explored together in the treatment room.